Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta

Author:Dana Spiotta [Spiotta, Dana]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2011-07-11T20:00:00+00:00

BREAKING EVENT #3

It happened as I was eating in front of the television news. I know this was asking for it, I know, but this is what people who live alone often do. I was tired and couldn’t bother with the paper. I didn’t even want the commitment of a movie. Mostly, then, I watched the news.

A breaking story was in progress. Everything was always in progress and yet still breaking. The cable news people were discussing a missing child. Since I had just tuned in, they worked hard to catch me up on what was now unfolding. This wasn’t some suburban child stolen from a backyard in California. This was a thirteen-year-old Amish girl from a community in upstate New York. A box in the corner of the screen showed a live shot of a quiet dusty road with some patched farm hills in the background. When they moved to a full screen of the live shot for a reporter’s update, I could barely make out a church steeple silhouetted against the distant mountains. The update was: no updates yet, but they never say that. They were interviewing random, non-Amish locals.

Nobody, it was clear, had a clue. Then they had an Amish expert on to talk. While she spoke, they showed stock footage of a buggy with a fluorescent orange safety triangle on it as the professor explained what Old Order Amish believed. What technologies they resisted. Why they refused to be interviewed on camera. They also brought on a missing-children expert. They spent minutes repeating, in different ways, the total lack of clues. But what trumped all of this information about the lack of information and showed clearly the reason we were all so deeply concerned was what they did actually have: a photo of her, the missing girl. A single gorgeous photograph apparently from a feature in a glossy magazine where the photographer had taken striking close-up portraits of rural Americans, particularly Amish and Mennonites. Amish usually don’t let themselves be photographed (said the Amish expert—the headline read “Plain People” as he spoke). Amish believe photographs encourage vanity.

Yes, yes. I put a forkful of brown rice in my mouth. Clearly that was one of the many dangers in photographs; and yet here was this rather exceptional photo of this girl. It is an intimate shot, not awkward or posed at all. She is carrying a bucket and the weight of it has pulled her arms down and forward toward the camera. She wears a sheer white cotton bonnet. The ties are undone and hang like hair down the sides of her face. A few strands of blond hair escape the edge of the bonnet and soften her cheek. Her eyes are wide-set, pale and clear. But she has the tiniest hint of something hard to fix in her expression—a delicate wisp of mystery, as if her fragile lips might be about to smile. She didn’t look childish or even very pretty. She just attended the moment—the camera’s moment—in a way that looked intensely present.

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